Ashlesha is the ninth nakshatra, spanning 106 degrees 40 minutes to 120 degrees of the sidereal zodiac, closing out Cancer. Its Vimshottari ruler is Mercury, its presiding deities are the Nagas, the serpent spirits, and its symbol is a coiled serpent. The name means the embracer or the entwiner. Jyotisha reads Ashlesha through serpent imagery, hypnotic, penetrating, coiling, and capable of both wisdom and venom, and classes it as Rakshasa gana. It is regarded as one of the sharper and more intense mansions, associated with insight that can wound, and with the kundalini serpent-energy in later yogic readings. These attributions are interpretive conventions of the tradition rather than claims about the stars, which here are the faint arc in Hydra's head that Indian astronomy assigns to this segment.
Ashlesha's padas fall in Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn and Aquarius, closing the sign of Cancer and, with it, the first third of the zodiac's twenty-seven-fold division. The Nagas as a class occupy an ambivalent position in Indian religion generally, feared and destructive in some contexts, worshipped as guardians of hidden treasure and protectors of the underworld in others, and Ashlesha's own delineation preserves exactly that ambivalence rather than reading purely as an ill-omened mansion. Some later astrological compilations pair Ashlesha with Jyeshtha and Revati as the three Gandanta junction points, the fragile seams where water signs meet fire signs at the zodiac's structural boundaries, a technical classification used in birth-timing and naming rituals separate from the ordinary gana and deity attributions.